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Brading, Brantingham and York: a New Look at Some Fourth-Century Mosaics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

Roger Ling
Roger Ling
Affiliation:
History of Art Department, University of Manchester
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Extract

In an article published in Britannia in 1980, Reinhard Stupperich argued for the dominance of classical iconography in the mosaic pavements of fourth-century Britain and showed how a number of pavements had previously been misinterpreted. Among the scenes which he examined, at least three which had appeared anomalous to earlier interpreters were shown to fit more or less within standard iconographic formulae: a scene from East Coker showing Dionysus and Ariadne, and panels from Keynsham representing Athena playing the flutes and Achilles discovered on Skyros. The difficulties which they had caused were due to lack of skill or understanding on the part of the craftsman who produced them, to the imperfect state of their preservation, or (where destroyed) to the unreliability of the modern draftsman to whose record we owe our knowledge of them.

Type
Articles
Information
Britannia , Volume 22 , November 1991 , pp. 147 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Roger Ling 1991. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

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